Realistically, your choices aren’t “EVs or mass transit”, your choice is “EVs or Gas cars”.
Incidentally, your gripes apply to high density population areas, where busloads of people want to go from the same point A to the same point B at the same time, and cars do not make sense. That flips when you get to a more distributed population, where a hypothetical bus would run its route empty or with 2 or 3 passengers most of the time, in which case the car is actually “greener” because it’s not making empty trips and it uses less energy to move 2-3 people.
The only reason people in urban centers do not have transit is because governments neglected to build it. If they can build a 6 lane highway through your city, they could build transit.
We shouldnt use rural and spread out areas as an excuse to not build our cities and denser areas better and service them with transit.
Sure, but be aware that your messaging isn’t so targeted. The messaging is “fuck cars” not “our dense cities need to be more walkable and transit”. In this very thread it’s “we shouldn’t do anything for EVs, cars aren’t the answer anyway, we need to be ditching cars”.
Yes and i agree with that sentiment. 20 years down the line we will realize our cities are just as unwalkable and unable to be served by transit if we build them to exclussively serve the car. We should build cities so walking, cycling, transit and driving are all realistic options. For most north American cities we only prioiritize the car.
Sure, and I’ve seen some good projects, and less than good projects.
In my city, they took a street and closed it and redid it as pedestrians only. Worked great, more foot traffic going from any establishment to any other, and car people only had to walk an extra block or two to get to things.
There’s a section where they made a highly walkable environment from scratch, with car access basically through entering a big mostly underground parking deck, so the surface was reasonably car free.
On the flip side, the city loved these efforts so much they mandated mixed use zoning for all new construction. And the three big projects I’ve seen play out under this new scheme all followed the same recipe:
Proposal with 90% residential, and 10% “retail/commercial”
The proposal is phased, with hyper detailed residential plans and a vague box for the “retail/commercial” phase “to come later”
The residential is built, and then the company withdraws their plan for further development.
One that did go in for the true mixed use early on suffered because no commercial tenant would tolerate streetside only parking (which was effectively part of the deal, given how the regulations were written parking lots/decks were not viable for these “walkable neighborhoods” when they could just have a parking lot or deck nearby by setting up their business somewhere else)
Realistically, your choices aren’t “EVs or mass transit”, your choice is “EVs or Gas cars”.
Incidentally, your gripes apply to high density population areas, where busloads of people want to go from the same point A to the same point B at the same time, and cars do not make sense. That flips when you get to a more distributed population, where a hypothetical bus would run its route empty or with 2 or 3 passengers most of the time, in which case the car is actually “greener” because it’s not making empty trips and it uses less energy to move 2-3 people.
The only reason people in urban centers do not have transit is because governments neglected to build it. If they can build a 6 lane highway through your city, they could build transit.
We shouldnt use rural and spread out areas as an excuse to not build our cities and denser areas better and service them with transit.
Sure, but be aware that your messaging isn’t so targeted. The messaging is “fuck cars” not “our dense cities need to be more walkable and transit”. In this very thread it’s “we shouldn’t do anything for EVs, cars aren’t the answer anyway, we need to be ditching cars”.
Yes and i agree with that sentiment. 20 years down the line we will realize our cities are just as unwalkable and unable to be served by transit if we build them to exclussively serve the car. We should build cities so walking, cycling, transit and driving are all realistic options. For most north American cities we only prioiritize the car.
Sure, and I’ve seen some good projects, and less than good projects.
In my city, they took a street and closed it and redid it as pedestrians only. Worked great, more foot traffic going from any establishment to any other, and car people only had to walk an extra block or two to get to things.
There’s a section where they made a highly walkable environment from scratch, with car access basically through entering a big mostly underground parking deck, so the surface was reasonably car free.
On the flip side, the city loved these efforts so much they mandated mixed use zoning for all new construction. And the three big projects I’ve seen play out under this new scheme all followed the same recipe:
One that did go in for the true mixed use early on suffered because no commercial tenant would tolerate streetside only parking (which was effectively part of the deal, given how the regulations were written parking lots/decks were not viable for these “walkable neighborhoods” when they could just have a parking lot or deck nearby by setting up their business somewhere else)